Chemical imaging. An innovative tool for particulate matter characterization and sorting

A fast, reliable, and low-cost characterization of particulate products as fed to a process, and/or resulting from different processing actions, represents one of the most challenging targets in the particulate solids handling sector. An adequate response of the industry to the market can only be given through the utilization of equipment and procedures ensuring pure, high-quality production, and efficient work and cost. All these goals can be reached by adopting not only more efficient equipment and layouts, but also by introducing new processing logics able of realizing full control of the flow stream characteristics of the handled material. Today, thanks to strong technological development, different techniques are available according to different sampling strategies and analytical principles to detect specific physicochemical attributes of particles. These represent the key factor in performing full process monitoring and/or applying specific control/tuning actions to the process itself. In this paper the principles and possibilities offered by the adoption of specialized devices allowing the development of online acquisition/processing strategies, based on chemical (or hyperspectral) imaging and finalized to perform particulate solid stream characterization, inspection, and quality control actions, are investigated and discussed.